Towards Data Science

Progress in AI has been accelerating dramatically in recent years, and even months. It seems like every other day, there’s a new, previously-believed-to-be-impossible feat of AI that’s achieved by a world-leading lab. And increasingly, these breakthroughs have been driven by the same, simple idea: AI scaling.For those who haven’t been following the AI scaling sage, scaling means training AI...

It’s no secret that a new generation of powerful and highly scaled language models is taking the world by storm. Companies like OpenAI, AI21Labs, and Cohere have built models so versatile that they’re powering hundreds of new applications, and unlocking entire new markets for AI-generated text.In light of that, I thought it would be worth exploring the applied side of language modelling — to dive...

Imagine you’re a big hedge fund, and you want to go out and buy yourself some data. Data is really valuable for you — it’s literally going to shape your investment decisions and determine your outcomes.But the moment you receive your data, a cold chill runs down your spine: how do you know your data supplier gave you the data they said they would? From your perspective, you’re staring down...

Today, we live in the era of AI scaling. It seems like everywhere you look people are pushing to make large language models larger, or more multi-modal and leveraging ungodly amounts of processing power to do it.But although that’s one of the defining trends of the modern AI era, it’s not the only one. At the far opposite extreme from the world of hyperscale transformers and giant dense nets is...

Deep learning models — transformers in particular — are defining the cutting edge of AI today. They’re based on an architecture called an artificial neural network, as you probably already know if you’re a regular Towards Data Science reader. And if you are, then you might also already know that as their name suggests, artificial neural networks were inspired by the structure and function of...

It’s no secret that the US and China are geopolitical rivals. And it’s also no secret that that rivalry extends into AI — an area both countries consider to be strategically critical.But in a context where potentially transformative AI capabilities are being unlocked every few weeks, many of which lend themselves to military applications with hugely destabilizing potential, you might hope that...

There’s a website called thispersondoesnotexist.com. When you visit it, you’re confronted by a high-resolution, photorealistic AI-generated picture of a human face. As the website’s name suggests, there’s no human being on the face of the earth who looks quite like the person staring back at you on the page.Each of those generated pictures are a piece of data that captures so much of the essence...

Two ML researchers with world-class pedigrees who decided to build a company that puts AI on the blockchain. Now to most people — myself included — “AI on the blockchain” sounds like a winning entry in some kind of startup buzzword bingo. But what I discovered talking to Jacob and Ala was that they actually have good reasons to combine those two ingredients together.At a high level, doing AI on a...

As you might know if you follow the podcast, we usually talk about the world of cutting-edge AI capabilities, and some of the emerging safety risks and other challenges that the future of AI might bring. But I thought that for today’s episode, it would be fun to change things up a bit and talk about the applied side of data science, and how the field has evolved over the last year or two.And I...

If the name data2vec sounds familiar, that’s probably because it made quite a splash on social and even traditional media when it came out, about two months ago. It’s an important entry in what is now a growing list of strategies that are focused on creating individual machine learning architectures that handle many different data types, like text, image and speech.Most self-supervised learning...